Ouran: The Lunch Table Edition
by The Buddy System
Summary: What would happen if the bodies of Ouran's hosts were suddenly inhabited by a group of perfectly insane teenagers? Pure crack. Read for teh lulz.
1. Introduction to Madness

Last night as I lay in my bed, gazing up at the stars in the night sky, my last thought before I drifted into a state of unconsciousness was: _where the heck is my ceiling?_

When I opened my eyes, I immediately realized that three things were way off: the first was that I was in a school—this wouldn't usually be odd, except for the fact that I couldn't remember ever having gotten dressed, and I didn't recognize the bizarre blue uniform I was wearing. The second thing that tipped me off was that things in general—the room, the tables, the people, et cetera—were all considerably… larger. Don't get me wrong; I am short. Very short. But at this particular moment in time, I felt significantly shorter than normal, which was, well, not normal.

The third minor issue was that everyone was entirely unrecognizable, much like the uniform I was wearing. No, I don't mean that everyone looked like my uniform—I mean that my uniform was something I'd never seen before, exactly like the faces of those around me. Who the heck were these people?

"Uh…" A deep voice that I recognized (hallelujah!) sounded behind me, and I spun around, looking up… and up, and up.

"Steven…?" I managed to say, but it came out as a baffled squeak. "Did you get taller?" I quipped, hoping that a bit of humor would help me collect myself. It didn't really have the desired effect. Steven looked different. A _lot_ different. He was taller than me (isn't everyone?), with short, straight-ish hair and a blank expression on his usually-cheerful face. Was I hallucinating? Were the janitors using some kind of experimental new product to clean the bathrooms?

Steven seemed as flabbergasted as I felt; one couldn't really tell from his passive expression, but his eyes showed alarm. "India?"

"If I look as different to you as you look to me," I began slowly, "then I really need to lay off the allergy medication."

Steven seemed to deliberate for a moment, then he picked me up. _That _was new.

"Put me down!" I practically shrieked, but he paid me no mind as he carried me over to a conveniently-located mirror hanging on the wall opposite us. What the reflective glass revealed to me was that I definitely needed to either see a therapist or stop drinking caffeinated things before bed.

I was small—nothing new there. But I was also blond with blue eyes. Oh, and I'd magically turned into a boy. One would think I'd have noticed.

"The… heck…?" I muttered, stunned into only being able to form simple thoughts and phrases. Steven examined his own reflection, and I vaguely wondered if he was as confused as I was. It was really hard to read his features, since his new identity didn't really allow much variation in facial expressions.

"Oh, hey." We both looked up quickly at the sound of another recognizable voice, followed by the appearance of another unrecognizable face.

"_Nick?" _Steven and I exclaimed simultaneously; Steven's "exclamation" was rather monotonous and didn't really fit the description of an exclamation. Nick was no longer a ginger—oh, horrors. What was the world without a ginger-Nick? The new Nick was a neat-looking character with trimmed black hair and a serious gaze, glasses propped precariously on the bridge of his nose. What was this? Some scary alternate universe? The fourth level of Hell? Sparta?

"It appears that we've somehow been sucked into an anime," the new-and-not-necessarily-improved Nick informed us. He looked so intelligent and proper that I almost wanted to call him "Nicholas". But in my mind, doing so would be the equivalent of actually acknowledging the psychosis that had developed as a result of God knows what. "Ouran High School Host Club, to be exact," Nick continued. Then he smirked at me. "Congratulations, India—you're now dating your cousin."

By this time, I had found a comfortable seat on top of Steven's shoulders, but I nearly fell off at that remark. I subtly tightened my grip on him, resting my chin on top of his head. I didn't even want to know how Nick had come to that conclusion. "Where is everyone else?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady as I stared at our once-redheaded friend from my perch.

"Hard telling, though I imagine we'll find them soon enough. Judging by our appearances, they've probably taken on the forms of the other protagonists from the anime—"

"Did your shape-shifting cause your brain to get bigger, or are you just way too into playing the part of the character you're supposed to be?" I deadpanned, and he fell silent.

"Let's go find them." It was the first time since this freakish reality-switch had taken place that I'd heard Steven say more than one word at a time. I would have nodded if it wouldn't have resulted in knocking my chin into the top of his head.

"REALLY?!"

"Found Lucas," I said matter-of-factly, watching a flock of sparrows scatter outside, startled by Lucas's incredulous yell.

The three of us followed the sound until we found its source. Lucas was staring at himself in a different conveniently-located mirror. I was beginning to wonder whether we were secretly in a commercial for mirrors, or the people in this anime just really liked to look at themselves.

"I…" Lucas was speechless as he stared into the mirror. "I'm blond…" He said softly, touching his reflection carefully. "I'm… _White…_!" His voice rose an octave, and I wondered if each new realization would make his voice rise in pitch until he achieved opera-singer status and violently shattered the mirror, sending shards of reflective glass raining down and effectively killing us all. Lucas made a quiet sound in the back of his throat. "I… I'm _GORGEOUS_!"

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I didn't see _that_ coming.

Lucas straightened up and flipped his slightly-curly blond hair, his blue eyes sparkling. "I'm beautiful!" he sang, earning perplexed looks from Nick and I while Steven looked on with his "my only facial expression is 'derp'" face.

Until now, the switch from normal human being to character from a random anime had resulted in maintaining at least some of our actual characteristics, even if they were extremely vague similarities. Steven was sometimes quiet when focused on something. I was extremely short. Nick was (somewhat) intelligent.

The pattern stopped there. Actually, the pattern _died _there. The pattern was lying in a corner somewhere, slowly wasting away due to some fatal illness while vultures circled overhead, waiting for the phase to complete itself. Lucas, the whitest black kid known to man, the most popular antisocial person on the face of the planet, had somehow become a self-absorbed, arrogant pretty-boy with fair skin and hair that could easily rival that of Goldilocks. What the fudge?

By this particular point in time, I was at least ninety-nine percent certain that things couldn't possibly get any weirder. But I've been wrong before, and was quickly proved incorrect again when two nearly identical male voices reached my ears. Oh, God.

"Hey you guuuyyyys!" Two identical boys literally _pranced_ over to join the rest of us—they seemed entirely unbothered by the current situation. Lucas was still fawning over himself in the mirror, which was a way more creepy than I needed, so I was content to turn my attention to the pair of twins that had just shown up.

The two boys were identical in every way but two: their auburn hair was parted in different directions, and the one with his hair parted to the left had a slightly softer voice than the other. They gave matching, ornery grins as they draped their arms across each others' shoulders. "What's up?" The question came from both of them simultaneously. I was still trying to figure out which one was Mason, and which one was Jesse.

Back when the world was a normal place to live, we'd often teased Mason and Jesse about how much they looked alike despite not being related. I was beginning to think that the pattern had somehow cheated death, but when I heard Lucas crooning to his reflection, that notion quickly disappeared and was replaced with the knowledge that the pattern had succumbed to the infection and was now a rotting pile of God knows what that the scavengers were slowly picking apart.

"Alright," I said quickly, staring down the two carbon copies with deadly precision. "I will figure this out if it kills me."

"No you won't!" the clones countered gleefully in perfect unison. I made a strong attempt to glower at them, but the fact that I inhabited a body that could have easily been that of a munchkin from the Lollipop Guild and thus made me about as menacing as a bowl of rainbows made the effort go to waste.

I quickly reviewed the options for addressing the two, should trying to actually figure out who was who end in failure. I could refer to them as Righty and Lefty, according to the way they parted their hair. Or I could call them Thing One and Thing Two, which would be nothing if not amusing.

"Hey, Mason," I said quickly.

"What?" both boys responded immediately, but the one with his hair parted to the right had turned his head toward me the fastest. Bingo.

"Okay, so Righty is Mason and Lefty is Jesse," I concluded aloud for the benefit of my other companions (i.e. Nick and Steven, as Lucas was still too busy complimenting his reflection to really give a crap about the world around him).

"You're wrong," the pair insisted together, and I snorted to hide a laugh due to the fact that they were actually _pouting_ at me.

"Huh," I responded, still clinging to Steven and peering at them from over the top of his head. "Y'don't say."

The twins' pouts turned to glares, and then Jesse (I think) suddenly whimpered. "You're so mean…" he sniffed, tears forming at the corners of his amber eyes as I stared, entirely nonplussed by this turn of events.

I managed to keep my mouth from hanging open all the way up until the point where Mason (again, I _think_) pulled his twin into his arms, using his slender fingers to tilt Jesse's chin up so that he could gaze into the other boy's eyes. I think that's where I started catching flies.

"Dear brother," Mason murmured softly to the teary Jesse. "It doesn't matter what they say—they don't know anything." His voice was soothing, but firm at the same time. Jesse sniffled and fluttered his eyelashes. My right eye twitched. "We don't _need _them," Mason insisted quietly, earning a slight nod from his other half. "Not when we have each other."

Jesse managed a stronger nod and the two straightened up (did you catch the double entendre there?) as though nothing had happened. I silently closed my mouth and cast a glance at Nick, who looked highly disturbed by the display of uh… "brotherly love". I leaned down to gauge Steven's reaction to the little performance. Judging by his behavior so far, I figured that there wouldn't be a reaction. I was correct. My boyfriend's face was completely void of emotion, which was a little scary.

Actually, now that I thought about it, the fact that I had been unwittingly thrown into a male body (granted, I was a very cute a fluffy boy, but still a boy) made me a little unsure about how this whole relationship thing was going to work out. Not to mention that Nick's random remark about an unexpectedly-acquired blood relation made things even stranger. Mason and Jesse seemed to be figuring things out, but that was entirely different. Sort of.

But I digress.

"I want some cake," I declared rather loudly, attracting the attention of a virtual zombie, a fake genius and a pair of twins with _slight_ homosexual tendencies.

All of Lucas's attention was still on himself—I could still hear soft, drawn out coos of "bea-yew-tee-ful!" and similar self-flattering remarks coming from the corner of the room. I cast a curious glance over my shoulder; the mirror at which we'd left our formerly-black acquaintance now bore several smudges on its reflective surface, and I realized with a touch of sheer horror that Lucas had actually attempted to make out with his own reflection. Oh, God.

"Cake?" Mason and Jesse echoed me, as well as each other, calling my attention back to my previous statement. I was glad to be so abruptly yanked away from the very idea of Lucas's apparent love affair with himself.

"Uh-huh," I said thoughtfully, peering at them from over Steven's head. I liked it up here. It made me feel tall. "We should have some cake or something."

Nick pushed his glasses further up onto the bridge of his nose. "Now who's trying to play the part?" he asked. I took the question as a rhetorical one and thought it appropriate to stick my tongue out in response. So what if whoever the heck I was supposed to be had a thing for cake? Put something sweet in front of me, and I'm certainly not going to just frolic away without my noms.

Surprisingly, the next person to speak was Steven. His voice was quiet, deep and void of any inflection whatsoever. Yet his words made me break into a grin that would look goofy on my actual face, and more so, I figured, on the face of the little blond who's body I was currently controlling.

"Let's go make a cake."


	2. Sweet Insanity

We had readily accepted Steven's quiet suggestion and trooped through the halls in search of a suitable location for our project. Amazingly, the six of us had found the school's extensive kitchen to be vacant and conveniently filled with virtually every edible substance known to man, as well as every cooking utensil and kitchen appliance I had ever seen (and some I hadn't).

That was where the madness began. To put it bluntly, saying that this had been a bad idea would have been the understatement of the millennium.

After having inhabited the vast kitchen for no more than ten minutes, there had already been three casualties. Luckily (or perhaps unluckily), the victims had not been people—they were considerably rounder and more fragile than the average human being, as well as whiter than Lucas could ever be.

"_Nick!" _My voice, which was higher in pitch than it had ever been when I was a girl, rang out in the expansive kitchen. "That is _not_ what I meant when I told you to beat some eggs!"

Crunchy bits of eggshell were scattered across the counter, which was now considerably slipperier than it had been five seconds ago—_before _it had been covered in the splattered remains of several eggs. Nick, dark eyes glittering with either excitement or malice (I couldn't really tell), looked up at me questioningly. There was a large plastic ladle in his hand, which I immediately pinpointed as the murder weapon.

"What did you mean, then?" he asked, and I resisted the sudden urge to facepalm.

I quickly located a whisk, which I presented to him with the hope that he would recognize the implement and put it to good use. He seemed to understand, so I left him to his devices as I walked around, inspecting everyone else's work.

Back when things had been fairly normal, not everyone was this ungodly tall compared to me. Tall, yes, but now everyone had grown at least a foot while I was positive that I'd lost a good four inches off my already minimal height. To fix this, I hopped up onto the counter, sitting with my legs dangling over the edge while I watched Steven mix dry ingredients such as flour and sugar in a large white bowl. He seemed to be the only person besides myself who had any clue what he was doing.

A loud yelp from the other side of the room caught my attention, and I slid down off the counter, landing easily on my feet. Trying not to think too much about what the cause of the pained sound had been, I made my way over to where Mason and Jesse stood.

I had given the twins the fairly simple task of cutting the massive block of baking chocolate I'd presented them with into chunks that would adorn the top of the finished cake. Apparently my definition of simple and theirs was entirely different.

"What happened?" I asked the identical pair. Mason's eyes were worried as he stared at his clone—Jesse was sucking on the tip of his finger, and I quickly guessed that he'd managed to injure the digit with the large knife he'd been using.

"It hurts…" the wounded redhead mewled, taking his finger from his mouth to examine the damage. The way he'd been whimpering, I'd expected to discover a good-sized chunk of fingertip missing. Instead, there was a tiny gash in the skin that oozed a thin trickle of blood.

Mason's reaction and mine were very different.

My response was to roll my eyes at Jesse's dramatic façade. That was a lot of whining for such a small cut; I'd been about to say so when I saw Mason's eyes widen in alarm.

"Jesse!" He exclaimed in horror, suddenly embracing his brother and taking hold of his injured hand. I had begun to back away, thoroughly weirded out by the performance. Jesse whimpered again and hid his face against Mason's shoulder as the latter murmured softly to his sibling. "It's okay… I'm here, alright?" Mason stroked Jesse's auburn hair, sharing a tender moment with his brother as I quickly retreated to check on Nick's progress with the eggs.

Perhaps "progress" wasn't the best word for it; when I approached Nick, I quickly discovered that two more eggs had fallen victim to brutality and had their lives viciously ripped away. I approached just in time for the third's guts to splatter in all directions and a clump of yellow eggbrain to land ungracefully on my left cheek.

"Nick," I said through clenched teeth, and he turned to face me. Seeing the look on my face, he covered his mouth to hide a snort and passed me a towel.

"Do you need me to _show _you how to use a whisk?" I asked tightly, noticing that he'd been using the tool in the same fashion as the ladle: sadistically bashing the eggs into oblivion. The proof was in the pudding—or rather, on the ceiling.

While the twins homo'd on the other side of the room and I tried to express to Nick that beating eggs did not necessarily involve the use of violence, Lucas was sitting by himself in a corner.

"Even upside down, I'm still drop-dead sexy…" I heard him marvel as he gazed, awed, at his distorted reflection in a large metal spoon. There was officially no hope for him.

"Do you get it now?" I asked Nick after I had demonstrated how to properly beat eggs without sending little bits of eggshell-shrapnel into foreign countries. He nodded slowly, and I felt a small spark of hope (more so than I felt for Lucas) as I placed the whisk back into his hand. He examined it for a moment, deliberating… and then promptly slammed it down on top of yet another egg, which exploded so violently that I was sure people in China felt the shockwave.

I quickly reclaimed the instrument from Nick's hand, batting chunks of eggshell off my uniform jacket.

"Nick," I said calmly, trying unsuccessfully to keep my eye from twitching. "Would you care for a more… suitable task?"

Nick nodded eagerly, and a small part of me wondered where the prim and proper character he was supposed to portray had wandered off to. The poor soul had probably gotten lost somewhere—Nick's mind was an expansive and undoubtedly dangerous place. I sighed and directed the former-redhead toward the opposite counter where the twins had been chopping up hunks of chocolate before a little injury had led to a lot of brotherly love.

I am usually a somewhat-careful person. However, as screwed up as the world was at this particular point in time, I saw no real reason to worry about the potential consequences of putting a knife into Nick's sadistic hand.

As Nick took to his newly-acquired task of massacring the block of baking chocolate the twins had neglected, I headed back across the kitchen to beat the eggs in a nonviolent manner. I cracked several into a bowl, moving a bit to the left to avoid the chunks of their relatives that were still falling occasionally from the ceiling.

When all was said and done, I grabbed the bowl of non-splattered egg and retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge before making my way back to Steven. "Almost done?"

He made a noncommittal grunt that I took as a yes, and I dumped the blended eggs into his mixture of other ingredients. I then took the liberty of pouring milk into a measuring cup, climbing up onto the counter and sprawling out on my belly until the lines on said cup were level with my face.

"I'm just trying to be accurate," I said defensively upon earning a questioning stare from Steven. At least, I thought it was a questioning stare—one couldn't really tell since his happy face, confused face and derp face were all the same freaking face.

Once I was sure I had the right amount of milk, I poured the contents of the measuring cup into the bowl-o-cake-mix while Steven looked on.

"Mason!" I called over my shoulder as I sat cross-legged on the counter and began to mix the various powders, eggs and dairy together with a spoon similar to the one Lucas was fawning over himself in.

"What?" Both Mason and Jesse's voices responded, and I rolled my eyes.

"Preheat the oven to three-fifty," I told them, no longer talking to just Mason. I hoped that the two of them, with each others' help, could manage the incredibly-harrowing task. Insert sarcasm.

Taking the series of beeps I heard from the other side of the room as a reassurance that they weren't doin' it wrong, I finished mixing the batter and handed the bowl to Steven, who poured the contents into a cake pan while I plucked several pieces of eggshell from his hair.

That was when all heck broke loose.

I smelled the smoke before I saw it, a thick black cloud billowing up from the oven that Mason and Jesse were peering into and giggling. As I jumped quickly down from the counter to see what the Identical Idiots were _doing,_ I vaguely wondered why the heck some kind of smoke alarm wasn't going off and made the somewhat unconscious decision that if there was ever some kind of uncontained fire in this school, we'd all be majorly screwed.

When I came to an almost-skidding halt behind Mason and Jesse, I discovered the source of the smoke: a mixture of flaming stupidity and a ball of equally-fiery paper that the pair had tossed into the oven.

A small part of me grinned at how similar their whines of pain were when I slapped both of them in the back of the head.

"What was that for?!" Jesse demanded hotly (no pun intended). Mason glared at me, rubbing his head and then obsessively fixing his auburn hair.

"I think the more predominant question here would be, 'why the _heck _are you setting things on fire?!'" I snapped, earning two identical pouts from two identical faces (on two identical heads which sat atop two identical pairs of identical uniform-clad shoulders… you get the picture). I felt zero sympathy for them.

"It was an experiment," Mason defended, lips turned down in a child's scowl. Jesse nodded, coming to his brother's aid.

Suddenly, the pair of them broke into matching, devilish grins.

"Hey, Mason," Jesse drawled, arching an eyebrow as he turned to his clone. "Has it occurred to you…"

"That we're being scolded by someone a third of our size?" Mason finished lazily, smirking at me in a way that should have been illegal. The pair of them reached out identical hands and patted me on the head, and it was all I could do not to stuff them both into the oven.

The appliance in question was no longer smoking, and I noted with approval that Steven had fished the torched paper snowball out with a pair of tongs, doused it with water and disposed of it in the trash can. The only downside was that the kitchen was now filled with the lovely scent of wet ash.

"I feel pretty~!" Lucas sang, succeeding in distracting all of us at once, with the exception of Nick, who was still hacking away at the chocolate and wielding his kitchen knife like a weapon of mass destruction.

No longer certain about anything anymore, I groaned and put the cake, in all its chocolate glory, into the oven.


	3. Oh Look, Canon Characters

Picture a group of six perfectly-sane friends gathered by a warm, crackling fireplace, chatting amongst themselves whilst sipping tea and eating cake.

Now subtract the fireplace and cross out the phrase "perfectly-sane." Add a dash of stupid and a pinch of fairy dust, and you pretty much have the situation at hand.

The cake had turned out fairly well despite the fact that the lingering smoky flavor from the twins' paper "experiment" made it seem like the confection had been prepared by a group of cigarette addicts. It wasn't all that noticeable, though, since we'd slathered the thing with so much chocolate frosting that it could correctly be referred to as frosting with cake rather than cake with frosting.

We'd also been able to wrestle the knife away from Nick before he'd chopped the mass of baking chocolate into fine powder—the end result was a very pleasing coat of chocolate chunks adorning the frosting-smeared outside of our culinary experiment. Yay.

"We did good, guys," I said in my way-too-high-pitched-and-cute-for-a-high-schooler's voice as I stuck another forkful of chocolaty glory into my mouth. I was still sitting on top of Steven's shoulders, and my plateful of cake was balancing on top of his head. Thankfully, his natural stillness and tendency to just sit there and exist made this less of a danger than it should have been.

Lucas nodded in agreement—I was still in shock over the fact that he'd actually stopped fawning over himself long enough to join us. "Truly a lovely job," he praised. "We've completely outdone ourselves!" I quickly shoved another bite of cake into my mouth to block a snarky "_We?"_

My thoughts were voiced, however, by Mason. And Jesse. Simultaneously, as usual. "What do you mean '_we'_?" the identical heathens remarked. "You were too busy fangirling over your reflection to actually help out."

"I'm surprised we were able to move you from the music room to the kitchen," Jesse said, speaking separately from his brother for once. He had a glob of chocolate frosting at the corner of his mouth, and Mason dabbed it away as he spoke. "You were totally zoned out."

Lucas didn't look the slightest bit ashamed. If anything, his expression was a tad indignant. "Excuse me if I was slightly taken aback by being able to experience the immaculate beauty of God's creation first-hand," he retorted, giving his blond hair a flick and sparkling vividly. Other than the obvious appearance change, I'd noticed that two other things about Lucas were different. His brain had developed the ability to produce an extensive vocabulary, and his body had developed the ability to produce massive amounts of glitter.

"You guys are forgetting that Lucas is God's gift to humanity," Nick said sardonically, sipping at his tea, and I was unable to stifle the snort that resulted in my inhaling a chunk of cake. I coughed a few times, barely managing to grab my plate as Steven tilted his head back slightly to look up, concerned.

"Don't die," the twins advised, grinning those identical grins as they finished their cake. I glared in response, succeeding in looking about as dangerous as a kitten wearing a top hat and bowtie.

At that particular moment, the creaking of a door interrupted the clones' gigglefest and caused the six of us to look up, all wondering the same thing: WHOSSAT?!

Each and every one of us stared at the dark-haired individual that entered the room through the annoyingly-creaky door. Right away, I was certain that said individual was of the female persuasion despite wearing the same uniform that we were as opposed to flouncing about in one of the horrifically-poofy yellow _things _that the other girls were wearing. I was entirely unsure as to whether the others could tell that the newcomer was a girl, but it was obvious to me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was a girl too… once.

The other thing that immediately stood out to me was the fact that the new addition to the room's population was one hundred percent certifiably insane. There was no other explanation for why she approached the six of us with absolutely zero hesitation—no human being with any amount of sense would even consider doing such a thing.

"There you guys are!" the cross-dressing newbie exclaimed, sounding annoyed. "None of you were in here earlier—I walked around the entire school looking for you."

"We were making a cake," the twin demons from Hell chorused happily, exchanging a mischievous glance and throwing their arms around each others' shoulders. "You should have been there, Haruhi."

"Yes," agreed Nick, pushing his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. "Perhaps Haruhi could have stopped the two of you from nearly burning down the main hallway."

"_Haru-chan!_" I promptly squealed and, without really deciding to, flung myself off of Steven's shoulders and glomped her. I didn't really know why.

Obviously not expecting the sudden little-blond-munchkin-from-Wonderland attack, Haruhi staggered backward and just barely managed to maintain her balance. I would have been impressed if not for the fact that getting tackled by someone my size was basically the equivalent of having a small, fluffy pillow thrown at you.

"W-woah, Honey-sempai!" Haruhi stammered, and I swiftly detached myself from her and climbed back up onto Steven's shoulders as though I hadn't just launched myself at her like a small, fair-haired missile.

"Who is she?" My human perch asked monotonously. So monotonously, in fact, that the grammatically-correct version of his inquiry would have included a period instead of a question mark.

Haruhi's expression made it seem as though he'd just asked if she'd recently seen a flying walrus wearing a seashell bra, because one had stolen his wallet yesterday. The dumbfounded look was accompanied, appropriately enough, by an incredibly-well-thought-out "what?"

Steven didn't say anything in reply, apparently waiting for me or someone else to answer his question. When no one did, Haruhi spoke again.

"How do you not remember me, Mori-sempai?!" she demanded incredulously, eyes still wide with shock.

Steven's face was entirely blank as he murmured his reply: "I don't watch this show."

Haruhi stared back at him almost as blankly now, and I wondered vaguely whether she was actually trying to think of something intelligent to say or just entirely stunned into silence.

That silence probably could have lasted forever had Lucas not risen from his place on the couch and slowly approached Haruhi, blue eyes wide and about as sparkly as his hair.

Predictably, as any sane human being would do in this situation (and by _situation_ I mean being approached by a possibly-mentally-unhinged blond model-type with a God complex), the girl backed up several paces. "Tamaki-sempai—" she started, hands out in front of her in the universal you're-freaking-me-the-heck-out-please-don't-come-any-closer gesture.

Lucas, however, paid about as much attention to her discomfort as Steven paid attention to, well, anything. When he had closed the distance between them, he took both her hands in his, staring, fascinated, into her eyes.

"I can see into forever…" he crooned, sounding almost inhuman.

"Lucas is scary," I mumbled in my still-too-high-for-a-teenage-boy voice, and Steven reached up to pat my head.

While Lucas was visually molesting Haruhi (read: staring into her eyes until her soul virtually disintegrated), the twins were busy investigating a rather random door that I was pretty sure hadn't been there five minutes before.

Mason tugged on the handle, and the door opened slightly. When the creepy black aura started oozing out and the sound of wailing hell-monsters reached my ears from just beyond the door, I clung to Steven and watched the scene unfold from just over the top of his head.

"Welcome to the Black Magic club..." a creepy voice greeted a pair of unfazed auburn-haired devils. Perhaps the fact that they themselves were entirely evil protected them from the creepy creepiness of the creepy creeper that was creepily creeping on them from behind the creepy door.

"The what?" the twins asked simultaneously, and from the sound that the nameless figure made, it was safe to assume that they had either severely wounded his ego or kneed him in the groin.

"The Black Magic club!" Mister Dark-N-Scary said indignantly. "If you love the dark arts, all things occult, this is the club for y—"

"Who is this guy?" the twin heathens questioned, interrupting Doctor Doom-N-Gloom's commercial-like nattering.

"That's Nekozawa," Nick The All-Knowing answered over the wail of despair coming from Monsieur Spookypants. "He runs the Black Magic club, as I'm sure you've figured out by now."

"Yes!" Señor Scary cried triumphantly, apparently elated that someone knew not only his name, but the creepy club he was the president of. As elated as someone with a tendency to wear a black cloak and speak in a chronically-depressing tone can be, anyway. "You must be interested, correct? Captivated by the dark arts, entranced by terror and—"

"Actually, I was only answering their question," Nick answered bluntly, and Mister Morbid promptly fell over, landing just outside the door with a sob and a thud.

Before anyone had time to react, the duke of darkness let out an ear-splitting screech and scuttled back into his lair as though his butt was on fire.

Upon receiving perplexed glances from just about everyone in the room, Nick proceeded to explain that Nekozawa was photophobic. For those of you who have no idea what that means, Mister Scary no likey da lighty.

"If I'm exposed to light, I'll die!" Nekozawa insisted from the chamber of darkness that was really just an old classroom with a light-switch that had been "accidentally broken". I would've bet anything that it had been the victim of a violent and brutal murder, but that was beside the point.

"Is that so?" Mason and Jesse drawled, identical evil grins spreading across their identically evil faces. In the next second, the two had the beam of a high-power flashlight (which one of them had evidently produced from his pants or something) trained directly on Nekozawa's face.

Nekozawa's pupils (I wasn't even sure he had those at first, what with his eyes being hidden by the emocloak) shrunk to the size of pinheads, and his mouth opened in a scream that I was certain triggered another massive earthquake in some remote part of the world that no one cared about. If you'd blinked, you would have missed him fleeing into the darkness, his shriek echoing back to us as the gigantic dustcloud settled. They really needed to clean this school better.

There was a long silence while the dust bunnies found their way back to their little floor-forest home. Then Mason pulled out a coin.

"Heads, we go after him," he began, smirking.

"Tails, we follow him," Jesse finished grandly, and Mason flipped the coin.

The darn thing landed on its side and just stood there, defying logic, gravity, and possibly a few important rules of several major religions.

"Huh," Mason said as he and his brother calmly observed the well-balanced piece of currency. "That settles it then."

"Yeah," Jesse agreed, nodding slowly, and I barely managed to stop myself from asking what the unspoken third option had been.

In the next second, the two had sped off after Nekozawa, their evil laughter echoing back to the rest of us.

Haruhi massaged her temples as though the entire ordeal had spawned a parade of demon monkeys bashing countless pairs of cymbals together in her head. "Alright, let's follow them," the suggested reluctantly, heading off in the direction Mason and Jesse had gone. "We can't exactly leave them to their own devices—the school will be ashes before lunch."


End file.
